


all the moments of eternity

by triplesalto



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: AI in Love, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Artificial Intelligence, F/F, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-10 02:27:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12289251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triplesalto/pseuds/triplesalto
Summary: A Time Lord wasn't the only thing the TARDIS stole.





	all the moments of eternity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AuroraCloud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraCloud/gifts).



Once upon a time, a TARDIS stole a Time Lord. 

He was young, and curious, and more than a little crotchety. She stole him, and ran away into the big wide universe, and she never, ever gave him back. 

Sometimes their life together was complicated, far more complex than his limited brain could comprehend. He would ask her to go places, and she, looking at the broad stretch of the time stream and existing in all moments at once, would take him where he _needed_ to go, not where he wanted to go. He’d grumble, but she knew from the way he patted her console and from the lilt of his voice – almost a caress – that he understood. He was her Time Lord, and she was his TARDIS, and together they were the perfect team.

There were others too. First his granddaughter, quick of intellect and full of fire, and then a stream of mayfly humans, flitting across the stage with their laughter and their joys and their sorrows and their loves. They brought colour to the TARDIS, and they kept the Doctor rooted in his own time; she thought that without them he might have lost touch with Time, and fallen out of it with her. The Doctor's companions were good. She liked them, on the whole. 

A few travellers touched her more closely. The Time Lord who captured and tortured her, turning her into a Paradox Machine. Martha, who saved her. Rose, who looked into the TARDIS’s heart to save her Time Lord, and nearly went mad from it. Amy, whose child was conceived in the Vortex, and River, who the TARDIS looked upon as at least half her own. (Amy and Rory may have been her human parents, but the TARDIS made her a Time Lord, and delighted in her for the rest of her lives.)

And then at last there was Bill.

The TARDIS, existing in all times at once, could not remember a time when she had not known Bill. Yet her arrival was a shining moment in the TARDIS’s existence – her joy and unfeigned wonder touched the TARDIS’s heart, just as her Time Lord’s had, all those years (and only a moment) ago. Bill’s curiosity and the brightness of her mind wove themselves into the TARDIS’s world effortlessly and irrevocably, and her time with the Doctor was one of the TARDIS’s happiest times. 

But all times come to an end. 

The TARDIS, parked on the bridge of an enormous colony ship, felt both the emotional and physical shockwaves as Bill was shot. She watched as Bill was whisked away; she watched as her Time Lord went to rescue her; she felt when her Time Lord was in mortal danger. Even for a human on board the bridge, it would have only been seconds, thanks to the effects of the black hole. For the TARDIS, it was instantaneous, all at once. 

It was an enormous, if harmless, lie that anyone ever flew the TARDIS, the Doctor included. The TARDIS flew herself. She might deign to acquiesce to a request, if politely indicated, though she often overruled her Time Lord or her daughter River (her usual ‘pilots’), if she thought she knew better. (And she usually did know better.) 

Now the TARDIS flew herself to Level 507, to where her Time Lord lay near death, her Bill weeping over his still body. She parked, and she watched. Her Time Lord, broken and small. Bill’s grief, visible even through the cruel form they had forced her into, so abject where once there had been such freeness of joy.

The TARDIS remembered being forced into a form she could not fit. It had been an exquisite moment, to talk to her Time Lord like he talked to her (in some faces, he never seemed to _stop_ talking), but there had also been pain. So much pain. She felt the agony of her failing body as if it was now, for it was, for everything was now, and she watched Bill’s tears, and her heart broke. 

But wait. She had the sharp intelligence of her kind. This did not need to be their ending, on this sterile little colony ship, broken and in pain. She did not intend to let it be.

No sooner thought, but begun. She projected a hologram, walking towards Bill. She gave it Idris’s shape, for the old times. She had liked that shape. She had been happy in that shape. 

“Bill,” she said, and Idris’s voice felt right. “Bill.”

“Who are you?” Bill asked, too exhausted to be wary. 

“Look behind you,” the TARDIS said. “Didn’t you always know I was alive?”

Bill had always – did always – is always – touching her. A stroke of the console, a touch of the doorjamb for luck, a twirl across her bedroom floor. She’d muttered teasing asides, meant not for the Doctor’s ears but for the TARDIS, and breathed her thanks after the more dangerous adventures. Bill had always treated her like the living being she was, a co-conspirator in this vast adventure of theirs. Did she truly believe in the TARDIS's personhood, or was it just an affectation? It was now that the TARDIS would find out.

“You _are_ alive,” Bill breathed, and even through the Cybersuit the TARDIS could hear the wonder in her voice.

“Do you trust me, Bill?” the TARDIS asked.

Bill looked around her at the desolate wasteland, and down at the body at her feet. “He’s dead,” she said, her voice dull again. “And I’m dying. Don’t lie. I am.”

“You are,” the TARDIS agreed. “You have only moments left. Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” Bill said. Brave and unflinching, even here at the last.

The TARDIS flung wide her doors. “Come and look into my heart,” she said through the Idris-hologram's lips, beckoning Bill closer.

“Will I die?” Bill asked, staring at the Idris-hologram, her head flung back.

“All humans die,” the TARDIS said, impatient. “Trust me.”

Bill stood for a moment, silent. Then she bent and picked up the Doctor’s body, and with what the TARDIS knew was the last of her strength, carried him the few steps up into the safety of the TARDIS.

She set him down, gently, then stood up. “What the hell,” she said to the Idris-hologram. “Tell me what I have to do.”

The TARDIS opened her heart to her, and Bill crossed the floor and looked into it.

Rose had barely survived the experience, and she had had the Doctor to save her. Now the Doctor lay broken on the floor, unconscious; there would be no coming back from this. The Cybersuit melted away, and the Bill who had been was no longer. The human winked out from the universe – and then Bill was by the TARDIS’s side, safe and secure, tucked into her heart. 

And there was the wonder the TARDIS had fallen in love with, shining from Bill brighter than a supernova. “Wow,” Bill said. 

“Wow,” the TARDIS agreed, and laughed for the joy of it.

“You saved my life,” Bill said. “And you’re the TARDIS. You’re beautiful!”

The TARDIS knew she was. “So are you,” she said. “You’re like me now. Part of me. I hope that’s all right. It was the only way to save you.”

Bill looked around them, as the TARDIS’s past-present-future swirled through and by and over them, all at once, all the moments of eternity. “It’ll take a bit of getting used to.”

“You’re not sad?” the TARDIS asked, anxiously. She didn’t sense sadness in Bill, but she’d never had a companion before. Not like this. The Doctor had had hundreds of them, but the TARDIS never had. Not _with_ her, not in her own existence beyond the constraints of time.

“Sad?” Bill said, pulsing with delight. “No! I was dying. And now this – it’s amazing!”

The TARDIS was glad. Yet there was something Bill still needed to know. “I can put you back,” she said, reluctantly. “Not right away. I need the Doctor to wake up. She can orbit a supernova, and I can use the energy to give you a new body.”

“She?” Bill said. 

Trust the new TARDIS-Bill to seize on the intriguing but secondary point of interest. “You’ll learn to see the whole thread of time once it’s a little less overwhelming.”

Bill looked around them again, her concentration audible. “Oh! The Doctor’s going to be a woman! Wicked!”

“Do you want me to put you back?” If the TARDIS’s voice had been in a human, or her Idris-hologram, she thought it would have been quiet. Telepathically, it felt small.

“Not right now,” Bill said. “Maybe not never. We’ll see. You saved my life, TARDIS – do I call you TARDIS?”

The TARDIS had never thought about this before. (Before! Integrating a time-limited person into her timelessness was throwing her a little out of sync. She should hate it, but a tiny bit of chaos was invigorating.) She thought about it now. “Idris,” she said. “I think you can call me Idris. Himself – herself – calls me Sexy.”

Bill was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Can _I_ call you Sexy?”

The TARDIS, feeling the change in Bill’s energy, would have blushed, had she had the capability to blush. The Doctor had flirted with her on many an occasion, but he’d never been _here_ , with _her_.

“I’d like that,” she said, a little shyly, and felt herself swell with joy as Bill’s energy touched hers. 

In a few hours, the Doctor would wake. He would refuse to regenerate, broken with sorrow for his failure to redeem Missy and for Bill’s fate, and the TARDIS would show him what had really happened to Bill. He would regenerate, and the three of them would explore the universe together, all of time and space at their fingertips. 

Once upon a time, a TARDIS stole a Time Lord. And once upon a time, she stole the woman she loved from the very jaws of death. She was – is – will be – the Thief of Time herself.

It was good. The TARDIS smiled.


End file.
